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224 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) Townend, Matthew, Language and History in Viking Age England: Linguistic Relations between Speaker of Old Norse and Old English (Studies in the Early Middle Ages 6), Turnhout, Brepols, 2002; hardback; pp. xvi, 248; RRP EUR60.00; ISBN 2503512925. Matthew Townend’s Language and History in Viking Age England is a revised version of a doctoral thesis focused on characterising the nature of linguistic contact between speakers of Old Norse (ON) and Old English (OE) in the period 787 to 1018. Although Townend’s study is the first of book-length, his basic premise that these colliding groups experienced ‘adequate intelligibility’ (p.183) of one another’s language – basic exchanges like bartering, but not sophisticated exchanges – is hardly new, being noted by Loyn in 1977 for instance. Yet both the amount and variety of evidence that Townend assembles in this interdisciplinary study are impressive. In a work of historical linguistics that will be primarily of interest to historians, Townend is to be applauded for the effort taken to make the text accessible to non-specialists. Textual citations are given in both the original and English translation and relevant linguistic concepts are introduced and cogently explained before being applied to specific historical data. Yet some linguistic methodologies used by Townend are perhaps not suitable for such a readership. For example, the acceptance of lexicostatistical material, even if cautious, with the assertion that only diachronically has Swadesh’s magical formula for establishing ‘genetic’ relationships by comparison of ‘core’ vocabulary been rejected, is misleading. Indeed, such comparison has often been shown not to correlate well with results from exhaustive descriptive and comparative work.As such, lexicostatistical results are of limited use and one wonders why Townend even mentions them when their agreement with the careful reconstruction of others is of limited value anyway. The work’s particular attention is reserved for the question of the probable degree of mutual intelligibility between ON and OE for speakers in contact. After a brief overview of the documented linguistic contacts between AngloSaxons and Scandinavians between 787 and 1018, Chapter One presents four linguistic approaches currently used to measure intelligibility: linguistic comparison: Test-the-informant (RRT), Ask-the-informant and Analysis of social relations. Although mutual intelligibility tests are widely regarded as unreliable and variable in their results and some of tests are patently impossible in AngloNorse research, Townend argues that with ‘certain adaptations’ (p. 17) they may all be used and can provide a format for the work’s ensuing inquiry. Reviews 225 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Chapter Two is devoted to assessing the linguistic distance between Viking Age ON and OE, attempting to establish mutual intelligibility through a demonstration of the closeness of the two languages even after the three and a half centuries separating the Adventus Saxonum and the Viking Age. Despite the paucity of VikingAge ON, Townend presents a detailed phonological comparison of OE and ON showing that the two were similar at the time of re-contact, and therefore likely to be mutually intelligible. Townend argues that this is understandable because of the largely undifferentiated nature of the continental predecessors of ON and OE within the North-West-Germanic sub-grouping. The particular similarities between OE and ON are discussed but Townend does not explain whether he regards this closeness as wholly genetic or a matter of areal diffusion. His work here relies heavily of the work of Nielsen and seems little more than the relevant points from it, with other studies drawn on for confirmation. Chapter Three comprises Townend’s most original and innovative work. It is based on the notion that, while the informant testing of RTT is obviously not directly open to historical investigators, the mechanisms of intelligibility that these tests are meant to evidence are paralleled in some historical data. He argues that cognate substitution in place-names by the incoming linguistic group provides proof of processes of dialect intelligibility as modelled by Hockett’s code-switching theory and by Milliken and Milliken’s notion of dialect congruity: a speaker is aware of the phonological and lexical correspondences between their own speech and that of other dialect groups and this will be reflected...

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